Seeing and Hearing: The Double Challenge of Dance and Music 
1 February 2012
6pm - 7.30pm
Venue: Architecture and Planning Building, 26 Symonds Street, Auckland City, Lecture Theatre 421W-501 ALR6
Cost: Free
A public lecture by eminent visiting Professor Stephanie Jordan
Dance is virtually always music-and-dance, unavoidably interdisciplinary and ready for "marriage", or so the familiar metaphor tells us. The central position of music within dance and the "musicality" of the dancer have long been considered unquestioned facts of life. In her presentation, Professor Jordan will consider the complexity of "choreomusical" relationships – how seeing and hearing interact, how ideas about music can transfer to dance and how dance and the body can impact on musical experience and thinking about music.
Dance examples will be drawn from her recent work on Stravinsky. These include settings of The Rite of Spring by the German dance theatre specialist Pina Bausch and the contemporary French choreographer Xavier le Roy – who dances the conductor’s dance, with us, the audience, as orchestra – as well as the original Les Noces by Ballets Russes choreographer Bronislava Nijinska. She will also discuss her current project on the American contemporary dance choreographer Mark Morris and, in particular, his Dido and Aeneas to Purcell and Italian Concerto to Bach.
About Professor Jordan
Stephanie Jordan is Research Professor in Dance at University of Roehampton in London. She has had professional and academic training in both music and dance and holds degrees from University of Birmingham, University of California Los Angeles and Goldsmiths College, London University. Examples of her publications are Striding Out: Aspects of Contemporary and New Dance in Britain (1992), Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet (2000), and Stravinsky Dances: Re-Visions across a Century (2007, covering modern/postmodern dance as well as ballet), all published by Dance Books.
In 2010, Jordan was honoured with the award for Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance from the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD, USA). For Moving Music, she was awarded the 2001 Special Citation of New York’s Dance Perspectives Foundation. In 2002, she worked with dancers from New York City Ballet to create the analytical video Music Dances: Balanchine Choreographs Stravinsky, commissioned by the George Balanchine Foundation.
In 2004, with Geraldine Morris, she completed the video/DVD production, Ashton to Stravinsky, in collaboration with The Royal Ballet. Meanwhile, with Larraine Nicholas, she created the internet database "Stravinsky the Global Dancer", an ongoing project currently listing over 1,200 works choreographed to Stravinsky’s music. For her work in music and dance, she has received grants from the Radcliffe Trust, British Academy, the AHRC, the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, and Harvard University (the John M. Ward Fellowship in Dance and Music for the Theatre). She was recently awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for 2010-11 to work on a book on Mark Morris and music.
Professor Jordan has contributed to a variety of committees, judging panels and editorial boards, and has been a speaker on and consultant to numerous television and radio programmes in the UK.
